Top Five Soundbites From the Burrill Digital Health Meeting

By:
Cassie Arnold On February 12, 2013

I have attended the Burrill Digital Health Meeting every year since it started four years ago, and I found this year’s event to include the usual mix of practical advice and visionary thinking Burrill’s meetings are known for.

This year the visionary bits, at times, taxed the imagination of attendees who spend their days in the trenches of health care delivery. At the same time, it felt like there was more attention paid to the fundamentals such as how to keep patients or users engaged with these technologies and how to demonstrate value to payers.

Here are my top five soundbites from this year’s event:

“We don’t have a health care system, we have a dysfunctional sickness care system” – G. Steven Burrill on the misaligned incentives in the US health care system.

“BYOD stands for bring your own disaster,” – Bradley Rotter, Chairman and Co-Founder of AirPatrol emphasizing the risks inherent in allowing employees to use their personal devices to access sensitive or confidential data.

“We have to get TV on board,” – Matthew Holt, Founder Health 2.0 explaining that mHealth platforms need to be accessible through televisions, particularly when targeting elderly users (and I also duly note that he hates the term mHealth).

“People don’t really want to wear plastic and rubber,” – Sonny Vu, CEO and Co-Founder of MisFits Wearables, on why design is important to user adoption of sensor technology.

“The goal is to capture real time passive information,” – Julia Hu, CEO and Founder, Lark, on how to keep users engaged with mHealth devices in the long term.